Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
On Wed, 14 Mar 2007 19:30:37 +0100 Alexandre Buisse
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I quite agree with the Patriot act comparison, and I would be
interested to know what you think our real problems are.
Not a complete list, but probably a good starting point:
* Portage. Gentoo hasn't delivered anything useful or cool for two
years or so. Things like layman are merely workarounds for severe
Portage limitations (not a criticism of layman). Delivery to end users
is based around what's possible with Portage, not what people want or
need. In the mean time, managing a Gentoo system has become much more
complicated due to the increased number of packages on a typical system
and the increased requirements for the average user. Combined with
serious improvements in the competition, Gentoo's benefits are rapidly
diminishing. Until there's a general admission that Portage is severely
holding Gentoo back, anything delivered by Gentoo will be far below
what could really be done.
It's been claimed that Gentoo lacks direction. It's more accurate to
say that the inability to change Portage prevents Gentoo from going
anywhere. That small interface improvements can be passed off as a big
deal and that users get excited over minor config file tweaks is
indicative of how low people's expectations really are.
I don't claim to know everything that users want from the package
manager. I know that everything in [1] has been described by at least
one user as a major advantage for not using Portage. Unfortunately,
most of these aren't things that can be delivered easily with the
current codebase.
(Incidentally, since someone will probably try this argument: I held
these beliefs long before I started work on a Portage alternative.)
Well, I assume most everyone on this list has read the blog post about
Gentoo being unsuitable for servers. If not, I can hunt it down, but
it's a starting point for discussions about Portage and package
managers. I'll just throw out a couple of my own comments:
1. As far as I'm concerned, the one thing that absolutely positively
should have happened now but hasn't is some scheme where you have
something like Red Hat/Fedora's "green checkmark/red bang" indicator on
your desk, indicating whether your system is up to date, and a
classification of the available updates into security, bug fixes and
enhancements. I don't ever remember how long Red Hat has had that, and I
know Debian and the other apt-based package managers have something
similar, even if it's just a command-line level. On Gentoo, even with
the latest Portage, I do "emerge --sync; emerge -puvDN world" and just
get a list. There's no way to tell which of those are must-haves for
security without reading changelogs.
2. Just last year, the organization that is developing the LSB (Linux
Standard Base) standards got around to forming a working group on
package management. Bluntly put, everybody's package management sucks in
some way or another, and there are three major Linux package management
systems (RPM, apt and Portage) in addition to Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP
and R all having their own package management systems. But ... the Red
Hat/RPM/yum folks were there ... the Debian/Ubuntu/apt folks were there
... and I think the Perl and Python people were there ... Gentoo wasn't!
There doesn't seem to be any Gentoo representation on the Linux
Standards Base at all! So a "standard Linux" will end up being some
usable compromise between Red Hat/Fedora, Debian/Ubuntu, Novell/SuSE,
Perl/CPAN, Apache, MySQL/PostgreSQL, Python and PHP.
* Similarly, the belief that Portage defines Gentoo and represents a
lot of work. The tree defines Gentoo, and contains far more code than a
mere package manager.
The tree, like an ordinary tree, is a complex adaptive system, including
code, developers and users. I obviously don't have the same insight as a
developer, but I think it's in pretty good shape. As near as I can tell,
it's second only to Debian in terms of its size. There may be more RPMs
world-wide than there are .debs or ebuilds, but they *aren't* all
together in one place.
* The wrong idea of what the user base is, and what the target user
base is. Gentoo's direction is too heavily influenced by a small number
of extremely noisy ricer forum users, many of whom don't even run
Gentoo. Unfortunately, this self-perpetuating clique wields huge
amounts of influence.
You may not know what the user base is, but you can probably get a
pretty good idea of how *large* it is relative to Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian
and openSuSE by doing some simple web page hit statistics research using
publicly-available tools and data. And I think you'll be amazed at how
small that base is. Distrowatch was right about that part -- Gentoo
"share of mind" is dropping and dropping rapidly, although I don't think
it's because of misbehavior in the community. I think it's because:
a. Daniel Robbins left and went to Microsoft, leaving no "Mr. Gentoo", and
b. No effort to seek corporate support, at least none that I'm aware of.
In short, I'm not sure there is any future for *any* "pure community
distro". Somehow Gentoo needs to at least find a marketable defendable
niche and some kind of corporate sponsorship. Maybe embedded will turn
out to be that niche -- I'd love to have even 1/4 of Portage on
something like a Zaurus or "iPhone".
--
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky, FBG, AB, PTA, PGS, MS, MNLP, NST, ACMC(P)
http://borasky-research.blogspot.com/
If God had meant for carrots to be eaten cooked, He would have given rabbits
fire.
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